@stack I found your note here last night because (aside from the Home Assistant integration… haven’t done that yet on my side) I was experiencing the exact same thing (including the “firmware update fail will retry” message. Hoped to find the magic answer when I got to the bottom of the thread here but it looks like you are still fighting with it. I kept digging and managed to get mine resolved.
tl;dr - check, check, and then check again that you don’t have anything in your network setup that will prevent the Air Gradient box from getting out to the internet.
I popped open the dashboard yesterday and noticed that I had not received any updates since July 9. Rebooting didn’t help. Dug around on the forums here and found that there were WiFi issues with some recent firmware releases when the unit lost power. Everything else on my network was working fine. I live close to Houston and that was hurricane day. We did lose power a couple of times. I mentally shifted full-on to “I’ve got the wifi firmware bug” (which turned out to be inaccurate).
I was on 3.1.1 as of yesterday. I attached the Air Gradient One to my PC and flashed the firmware from 3.1.1 to 3.14 just like you. Also just like you, I was getting the exact same message progression as you listed in your last thread, including the “firmware update fail will retry” message.
I could see from my WiFi management tool that the unit was successfully connecting to my WiFi network. Still kept getting the same “firmware update fail” message. I flashed back and forth from 3.1.1 to 3.14 to no avail. Zero activity on the dashboard. I bit the bullet and tried wiping my device from the dashboard (I only had about a month of history… didn’t want to lose it, but I was at a loss for what else to try. No change. $%&#@$%&
FINALLLLLY (should have been the first thing I did) I looked in my firewall logs… I was getting blocked traffic there from a “default state violation” and had my “oh yeah…” light bulb go on. I have a very intentionally segmented network with VLANs… I usually group my IOT devices by vendor and stuff them into their own VLAN to limit what other devices they can chat with.
On Monday I realized that I had never moved the Air Gradient box into its new VLAN home, so I wasn’t just watching the storm blow through but I was tinkering with my firewall. I had set up its new VLAN, moved it over, and never bothered to check that it was still working afterwards. I had forgotten to allow internet access out of that stupid vlan!
In hindsight, I sort of think now that the “firmware update fail, will retry” message was not referring to a failed attempt on my part to go from 3.1.1 to 3.1.4 but instead it meant that it was failing to update the dashboard with its current version number and check for any new updates over wifi (because it couldn’t reach the internet)…
Good luck to you!
, and I’ve got the same boot sequence as listed above…